I think I may have been a bit harsh yesterday, 9News Canberra is of course better than WIN’s offering but I think we all expect TCN9 can do better than what we saw then.
Today the chair’s gone (easy) but they still need to address these issues soon:
Add story-specific backgrounds behind the presenters (the Parly House background + “SPORT” during the sport segment are so bad); I don’t see any excuse for 9News to be this lazy (if they don’t fix it, that’s what it is).
Add some vision for the short stories read by Vanessa (like tonight’s rainy car crashes bit)
Fix the theme at the ad breaks
Less Sydney fill-in Sydney stories would be nice
A second camera in the studio so they can properly switch between presenters (and the lack of a hand-back to Vanessa at the end of sport still seems odd).
Despite early issues it’s been a reasonable start, but I hope Nine can improve at least a few of these soon.
I agree 100% with these comments.
Thinking about here in NQ for example, I think it’s going to take Nine/SCA a good probably 2 years to make a decent dent in the audience of 7 News. I think it’s entirely possible, but they need to stick with it for the long haul.
Sport really should put GIO Stadium in the background, there looks like there’s some stadium shot in there, but it doesn’t look like GIO.
I don’t know if it’s just the video quality, but audio seemed really bad - the volume levels seemed all over the place.
They failed on localism a bit
‘crossing live to Canberra’, not mentioning Queanbean specifically, that just makes it feel like they are in another city.
The weather report was even worse for that - it’s not “the nation’s capital” and “Canberra’s” weather - it’s the weather in “the city” and the region around it.
Oddities like the lack of proper opener - no real introduction and lack of interaction between presenters are weird. I can see viewers being turned off by having this suddenly replace the Sydney news.
I think this will be the best long term, the investment in local news is great, and the format is I think the correct one - there’s just not a half hour’s worth of fully local news each night, making those bulletins largely filler - but there’s so many little things they could have done better.
You can see the whole thing in this shot from up-thread:
You can see that the plasma is basically in one corner and then the side panels reach across to the other corner. There is no space for anything more than the existing arrangement in that space.
If it’s anything like Prime7’s weather coverage you get the feeling that there is a disconnect between the presenter and the location they’re covering - it was particularly prevalent when Prime was still doing the news out of Tamworth but the weather from Canberra
This mock would be SOO much better than what they are using now, looks 100x better, allowing for the desk and wider set to be shown. Swap the local backdrop for a story-based OTS and that would be absolutely perfect!
There was an article published just after the affiliation swap in July last year that had details of Canberra news ratings.
That had Prime’s relay of Seven News number one at 6pm with Nine News from Sydney number two and WIN local news third.
But later in the year (October) WIN had come out at number one ahead of Nine by 1,400 and Prime by 1,900.
Hard to compare given a different part of the year and being a Monday bulletin, the rating would be higher than the full week, but WIN is up 7,500 (48%), Prime is up 3,500, Nine is down 3,000. What that means is hard to tell at this stage.
Damn. How can TCN9 not have a better option? Weren’t TCN9 moving from Willoughby to newer better facilites?
I hope the Vic & Qld bulletins will have studios larger than an edit suite.
I don’t know as I missed the start of today’s bulletin but my guess is all that changed today was the chair.
The opener-without-headlines might be acceptable in a shorter (30-minute) bulletin but not when you’ve got an hour.
